


don't run away/this time i'll stay

by TheAndromedaRecord



Category: The Bifrost Incident - The Mechanisms (Album), The Magnus Archives (Podcast), The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Identity Porn, Jonathan Sims is Lyfrassir Edda, M/M, but not really, cosmic horror, gee jon how come you get to be posessed by TWO eldritch entities, jon/lyf has a bad time, mechs jon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22994902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAndromedaRecord/pseuds/TheAndromedaRecord
Summary: After failing to convince anyone in the Yggdras galaxy to flee, Inspector Lyfrassir Edda picks a course and heads for the farthest planet he can find.He ends up on Earth, and takes the name Jonathan Sims.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims, Martin Blackwood/Lyfrassir Edda
Comments: 170
Kudos: 517
Collections: Identity Crisis, Mechanisms and Magnus Crossovers that maintain the integrity of mechanisms lore





	don't run away/this time i'll stay

**Author's Note:**

> i've seen a lot of "jon is jonny d'ville" so here's "jon is inspector lyf"  
> thanks to the HELL archives server for ideas for this!

No one listens to Lyf.

When he was an Inspector, he could direct attention with nothing but a whistle and a wave. Hell, he could do that even during his first years as a traffic cop. But not anymore. He’s not an Inspector anymore, and he’s coming to realize that it was the badge that made people listen to him, not anything about Lyf himself.

In the grand scheme of things, nothing he did with the police really ended up mattering. People listened to all his orders that didn’t mean shit. And now that he needs people to listen to him, they don’t. He just can’t find the right words. He tries so many ways of saying it, of warning them, but none of them work. 

Lyf sends his report to every outlet and center in the galaxy with an open connection. He broadcasts his warning message on every open channel. He warns everyone he meets on the way out of the galaxy to board a ship and not look back. None of them listen. Not a single one. All his investigation is for naught. Lyf is not a savior. He is merely a witness, forced to bear the terrible suspicion of the imminent deaths of every person he looks in the face. When he opens his eyes, he sees soon-to-be corpses. When he closes his eyes, he sees a familiar writhing of color stamped against his eyelids. He sleeps less and less. 

The more frustrated and despairing he gets, the more his mania shines through his face, and the less people listen. He’s taken up smoking again in whatever moments he can hide a cigarette from the crew of the various ships he’s catching rides on. How could he not smoke and drink himself into a corner after he looks at world upon world of people doomed to become crawling, gibbering _things._ Maybe if Lyf were better at convincing people, they would free the Elder Gods poised to tear apart reality. Each death will be his fault—he needs to make them listen, to know what he knows, to see what he’s seen, to fear what will come through the Bifrost.

_You’re not good enough to keep them away from us,_ sings a voice in the back of his mind. It sounds like Lyf’s voice. It has to be Lyf’s voice. Who else would it be?

Lyf wants to go back. There’s a gentle, horrible song in the back of his mind tempting him back to the Bifrost, to take the gift that the Old Gods have offered him. He knows the others all hear it too. He doesn’t listen, but they all do. 

It only takes a month for the unknowable things beyond the worlds to come through the Bifrost. By then, Lyf is far out of the galaxy, and he hears the reports of how a whole galaxy was consumed in a matter of hours and then vanished in an instant as that great twisting mass of color pulled every star and planet through the Bifrost to its realm. And then the Bifrost was gone, leaving behind a galaxy-size void where there once had lived trillions of people. People that Lyf swore an oath to protect and serve, and yet all he could do was watch.

Lyf knows the gods are sated. He can feel it in his stomach.

People are looking for him, apparently. Some of his signals made it out of the galaxy, and now everyone investigating the Second Bifrost Incident is looking for Inspector Edda, the only one who knew, the only one who made it out. Lyf doesn’t turn himself over, doesn’t seek them out, doesn’t make contact. What good would it do?

No one really knows how to deal with the disappearance of the Yggdras Galaxy. The number of deaths is so high that it becomes nothing at all. It’s a number far beyond what anyone can comprehend, and trying fills them with an impending sense of doom as their consciousnesses brush against something large enough only for the Elder Gods. So they don’t try.

Lyf is watched, and the feeling doesn’t get weaker when he’s alone. It gets weaker the farther he gets from where his galaxy used to be. The feeling scares him, so he keeps running. He can’t handle fear right now.

Lyf feels dull and empty. Everyone he’s ever known is dead—well, except for those three prisoners, but he wouldn’t grieve them anyway. Everywhere he’s ever been is gone. The enormity of his loss is too large to even comprehend, and its weight is so heavy and crushing that Lyf barely notices it, because there’s no point of reference, no time where he isn’t full of grief. He’s just numb. 

He tries to cry. He manages a few tears, but stops as soon as he sees himself in the mirror. The tear tracks glint like an oil spill, and his eyes are not the color they were yesterday. They are still brown, the exact same shade of brown, but they are not the color they were yesterday.

If he’d just made them listen. If he’d just been more convincing. If he’d found a solution rather than fleeing like a coward. The train was delayed by sacrifice—perhaps there was some sacrifice that would have closed the Bifrost. Lyf should have made it. Even if there was some sacrifice to be made, Lyf doesn’t know if he would have made it. 

He knows there wasn’t anything he could have done, but he doesn’t believe it. Something whispers that it would have been better if Lyf had stayed and let himself be consumed. 

On a ship flying to Promethea, Lyf stares out of the window and hums a tune to try to comfort himself. He stops abruptly as he remembers it was a song popular in his star system, and never quite reached outside of it. The writer is dead. The singer is dead. Everyone else who’s ever listened to it is dead. Lyf is the last man alive who remembers that song. A whole culture, wiped out in less than a day. A thousand cultures. A thousand celebrations and quirky greetings and buildings and holidays, all gone, and they live only in Lyf. Everything is gone. There’s so much life that was held within the Yggdras galaxy, and now it’s gone. Gone. Gone. 

Lyf’s breath comes hollow and fast. A thousand civilizations are dead, and he is the only imperfect archive of their impermanent legacies.

Lyf sobs against the window, and his tears gleam like fractals in the starlight. The drumbeats of dead ceremonies pound against his ribs until Lyf is sure they will break.

They exist on the net, of course. Lyf could look up the song. There are archives for everything. But all that art and culture feels totally meaningless without the people who gave it life and meaning. And they’re all gone.

People rarely, if ever, travel outside their own galaxies, and Yggdras is more insular than most. So many others are looking for Yggdras survivors, and Lyf checks obsessively to see if any have been found yet. There’s one woman who made it out just ahead of the Incident, but she died within hours, and the autopsy released something from her chest cavity that consumed three doctors. If Lyf’s warning did reach her, those deaths are also on his hands.

Lyf needs to hold the life of a galaxy within him. He failed to save them. He has to do his best. His best isn’t good enough. He writes down all the things he can remember about Yggdrass until half of his ratty backpack is filled with scribbled notes. He doesn’t know what to do with them, but he vows to protect them. They’re important. This knowledge is important. He’ll carry them with him, mold them into the person he’ll become once he’s away from prying eyes. 

Lyf is going to start a new life. He doesn’t even consider any alternatives. It’s too painful to keep going as Lyfrassir Edda, the last survivor of a dead galaxy. He’ll be a new member of another galaxy. Just another face in the crowd. No one special. 

There are plenty of planets where one can start a new life. Lyf goes beyond them. He goes beyond the stars of every possible confederation and alliance. He spends a week in the outer rim not talking to anyone—when have his words ever done any good? He starts finding work on ships carrying rare supply runs to scientific colonies in the outer worlds. And he stows away on scientific probes, hopping from asteroid to mining colony to new territory. 

He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t remember how he gets from Hestia to asteroid 89-B, but he knows the ship he was supposed to be on—the ship he was on—was destroyed. He finds out later that it was some skirmish or other. The ship exploded during reentry thanks to rival guns, and everyone on board died. Lyf was untouched on the surface. He can’t remember how he got there. He tries to remember, but in place of his memories is a wall of incomprehensible fractals that threaten to consume him. 

It’s probably just the trauma. Something traumatic happened, and he can’t remember it. It’s just that. 

And Lyf hasn’t been sleeping. Every time he sleeps, the corners of his dreams stretch farther than the farthest galaxy and they’re full of monsters and things beyond comprehension. He compensates with coffee, alcohol, and cigarettes. He doesn’t remember the last time his hands didn’t shake. It’ll be better when he finds someplace safe. There has to be someplace safe. 

He gets his own small ship and strikes out alone. He can’t afford to make friends or connections until he’s in someplace safe. 

Lyf is alone. He is desperately, achingly alone. There is not a single person alive with whom he shares a fraction of his life experience. He just wants someone to talk to, someone who understands. He’d settle for Marius at this point.

Lyf tries not to cry. His tears look all wrong. His eyes aren’t the same color they were yesterday.

Lyf is a stranger to everyone he meets, and they are strangers to him. Wherever he goes, he is not understood just as much as he was on the last planet. It’s comforting, somehow. It means it doesn’t matter where he settles—he won’t be more miserable and lonely and guilty there than anywhere else. 

Lyf keeps going. He keeps flying. He doesn’t know where he’s looking for, or even if he’s looking for anything. It takes him a few weeks to realize that, after all the chaos he’s seen, he simply longs for peace. He doesn’t want to keep compulsively checking every channel for updates on Yggdras. He doesn’t want to see his face in conspiracy videos. He wants to fix everything, somehow, but there’s no way he can do that, so the best he can do is hide from his mistakes.

Finally, he’s in the Untouched Worlds, where he can be free from politics and war and interstellar bandits. He can live a life uncomplicated. More importantly, the Untouched Worlds’ lack of interstellar contact means that they have no access to intergalactic records. Which means he can start a brand new identity. He can be someone normal, not the last survivor of a consumed galaxy. 

Lyf still sees the Bifrost behind his eyes and in his dreams. They’re nightmares. They have to be. 

He decides on a little place called Earth. He spends a little while orbiting the planet and piggybacking off the satellites around him to connect to the planet’s networks. He researches Earth. He looks at its culture, its customs, its currency and laws. He chooses a place called London, mostly at random.

Finally, he starts to run out of fuel and has to enter the atmosphere. He’s not quite ready. He’s not sure he’ll ever be ready for something again. The universe is so hellishly unpredictable. How could he possibly prepare for anything?

His breath trembles as the ship punches through the air and skids to a halt in an English forest. This is it. From the moment he steps foot on Earth’s surface, his new life begins. All he has are some forged documents, a list of places to apply for a job, his backpack, and a few knickknacks he can hopefully sell for Earth currency. He’d like some sort of research job. Something blandly intellectual, to sate his hunger for knowledge without ever placing him in danger or forcing him to comprehend and face some greater evil. He remembers Ivy Alexandria, and his mouth quirks up. Perhaps he’ll be an archivist. That seems safe enough. 

A new life. A new man. 

Jonathan Sims steps out of the ship and prepares to start his life in London.

**Author's Note:**

> ceaselesslywatched on tumblr!


End file.
